


One Step from the Edge (R1)

by TwilightKnight17



Category: Tales of Xillia
Genre: Bad Ending, Gen, alternate bad ending, sort of, the rest of the Xillia cast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 17:56:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8337304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwilightKnight17/pseuds/TwilightKnight17
Summary: When one choice is all it takes to drive someone past the point of no return, one detail might be enough to bring them back to sanity. Jude realizes they're doing everything wrong, a split-second before it's too late.Spoilers for Chapter 15





	

It felt wrong.

It had felt wrong since Julius explained everything to him on the walk back to Ludger's apartment building. Jude had trailed a step behind the older man, listening intently and resisting the urge to interrupt. He was grateful, of course, that Julius had come to help him out when he'd gotten cornered in the Spirius Building, but this...

He hadn't thought the path to the land of Canaan was lined with so much blood.

But here they were, on their way to Marksburg, after leaving Ludger to himself in his apartment with the letter that had shaken his world to the core. And Jude felt so guilty he could barely stand it. The train ride was an hour from Trigleph, and by the time they were approaching the station, the guilt had settled into a hard knot in his stomach.

Milla was the first to notice, as he lagged behind in Elym Harbor. She turned to him, asking, "Jude, what is it?"

He hesitated. "Are we doing the right thing? Leaving him like that?" Would Ludger ever trust them again after this? They had comforted him and then immediately left to kill his brother, after all.

"Jude, you said that this was what Julius wanted. What else are we supposed to do?" Milla said, hand on her hip. The rest of the group had stopped now as well, and were watching them curiously.

"I mean," Leia spoke up awkwardly, "I don't like it either, but if Julius wants us to..."

"But...isn't Bisley going up to Canaan too?" Elize asked. "How is he going to get there? Couldn't we just follow him?"

There was a moment where everyone was silent, and then, oddly enough, Gaius was the one to speak up. "Perhaps we should take a moment and follow Julius's advice to Ludger. He told his brother to steel himself. We will be of no use if we are not prepared to do what must be done either."

No one had any objections, and they agreed to meet at the opposite harbor in fifteen minutes. Jude ended up in the center of the market, staring at the gash in the ocean that marked where the schism had once been. Canaan cast everything in an eerie violet glow, but he could still see how blue the water was where it poured over the ragged edges of ground left behind.

Jude was an only child, but he cared for his friends like family. If they had learned that they needed to kill Alvin, or Leia, or spirits forbid, Elize... If one of his friends had to die, and it was done without him knowing, against his wishes, he would be horrified. He couldn't imagine how Ludger was going to react when he realized what had happened. But if this was what Julius wanted...

Who was he to refuse?

xXx

Julius was waiting when they reconvened in Rieze Harbor.

"Ludger's not coming, is he?" he asked quietly, and Milla shook her head.

"He said that he couldn't kill his brother."

Julius laughed weakly. "He never changes." He pointed to where a cord of purple light stretched up towards Canaan. "Bisley has already gone. He's used Rideaux, I assume. All those years of competing to ensure it was him instead of me, and it looks like we've both lost." Another self-deprecating laugh slipped from him, and he drew his sword. "I'll save you the trouble, but...thank you for being here. Tell Ludger..." He swallowed hard. "Tell Ludger that I'm sorry I was such a selfish brother."

He lifted the sword to his own throat, and something in Jude's heart seized. That lump of guilt threatened to choke him, and he was dimly aware of his friends averting their eyes. Elize had buried her face in Alvin's coat, Leia pulled her hat low over her eyes... Even Milla was staring at the ground. Gaius was the only one who seemed unmoved as Julius closed his eyes and took a breath.

A scream echoed through the strangely empty harbor, startling everyone as Ludger shoved his way through them to grab onto Julius's arm.

" _NO!_ " he shouted, and it might have been the loudest anyone had ever heard him speak. "No, no, Julius, no, you can't!"

"Ludger..." Jude could hardly believe it. To have gotten here that quickly, Ludger would have needed to be on the very next train, and even then... It was his fault. All his fault. If he hadn't held them up with his guilt and his uncertainty, it would be done. Ludger might hate them, but he wouldn't have had to witness this.

"Ludger, I told them to come here. This is what I want," Julius began, but the younger man was shaking his head furiously.

"A-Another way. There's got to be a-another way...!" he choked, clutching onto his brother as if the world would end if he let go.

Elize, her eyes tearful, looked around at the group. "Alvin, Rowen, there has to be something, right?" But both men just looked sad and resigned.

"I can't let Julius die," Ludger said, his voice cracking, and Jude would swear it was the most sentences in a row he'd ever heard him speak.

"I'm dying anyway, Ludger. I'm becoming a catalyst," Julius tried, before cringing in pain and dropping to his knees. Ludger fell as well, arms tight around him, and Jude started to step forward to offer first aid, but Milla held him back. Julius leaned against Ludger heavily. "It's for the best, Ludger. If you don't do this, they'll have to sacrifice you instead. At least this way my death will mean something."

Jude could see Ludger trembling. The poor guy had been through so much, in such a short time. It had to be even worse than when he'd been forced to flee Fennmont a year ago. His whole life had changed, but at least things were still there, waiting for him to come back. Ludger just kept losing everything, and it was no surprise when he said, in a wavering voice, "I... I can't... No..."

" _Now_ you're losing your nerve?" Gaius demanded harshly. "You would waste all of the worlds you destroyed to get here? We have to get to Canaan. This is the only way. Find your nerve, or move aside." He took a step forward, drawing his sword, and Ludger visibly bristled.

"Damn it, I said _no_!"

Suddenly, vividly, it was like Jude could see what was about to happen. He could hear Ludger's voice, the same but different, echoing.

_**Bisley made a grave mistake, trying to take Elle from me...** _

Ludger was protective to a fault. Ludger cared so much, and Ludger had lost so much. Victor had seen what appeared to be all of his friends and family turn on him, to take his child away, and now their Ludger was seeing the same. If this went on any longer, it wouldn't matter what they said. All he would hear would be them trying to get him out of the way so they could murder his brother.

Jude darted forward, putting himself between Gaius and the Kresnik brothers. "Gaius, stop!"

"You as well, Jude? I thought better of you." Gaius's glare was disapproving, but he hesitated out of the trust he'd built in the boy in the past year. Jude's gaze was grateful, before he turned to Ludger. He tossed his gauntlets to the cobblestones, then approached slowly, kneeling to lay a hand on each of their shoulders.

"Ludger," he said softly. Wide, frightened celadon eyes lifted to meet his own amber ones, and he was almost taken aback at how fragile the young man seemed. He let a first aid arte seep into Julius, taking away what little of the pain he could, and then he squeezed Ludger's shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring way. "We won't interfere anymore. I'm sorry that we left, that we tried to do this without telling you. If you need us, we'll be waiting in the inn, all right?"

Ludger nodded wordlessly, hesitantly, as if still afraid of being metaphorically stabbed in the back. But Jude just got up and turned to face his companions. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Jude, we can’t just…” Milla began, but she was interrupted by Gaius practically thundering, “We cannot allow this to be left up to--”

“ _Stop_ ,” Jude snapped, and all of them looked astonished at the vehemence in his voice. “Let’s go, all of you.” He waited until, reluctantly, they all began moving towards the inn. Only then did he follow, casting a brief glance back at the two brothers, who hadn’t moved.

This was the right thing, wasn’t it?

xXx

“Jude, what the hell?” Alvin demanded almost as soon as they’d shut themselves into the inn’s dining room. Like most of the rest of the Rieze Maxian side of Marksburg, it was essentially empty. Apparently the presence of Canaan in the sky was making people uneasy enough to stay away.

“We need a soul bridge to get to Canaan!” Gaius snarled. “If Julius becomes a catalyst, we will have to kill Ludger instead; is that what you want?”

Jude, despite the looks he was getting from most of his companions, held his ground between them and the door. “Don’t you understand what we were doing? Don’t you see what would have happened if you had tried to push him aside like that?!”

Gaius glared right back at him. “We would be on our way to Canaan, not holed up here wondering if Ludger is going to come through, or if we will have to sacrifice him instead!”

“Hold on a moment, both of you.” Rowen stepped forward, laying a hand on Gaius’s shoulder and turning sharp eyes on Jude. “What do you mean, what would have happened? Do you know something else that we do not, Jude?”

Jude nodded. “It’s just the same as before,” he said. “What Victor told us… Don’t you remember?”

“Victor…?” Milla trailed off, thinking back to that encounter. The others, meanwhile, looked more confused. They had only gotten the bare minimum of explanation of that dimension. Jude, Milla, and Rowen hadn’t wanted to talk about it, Elle had drifted into uneasy melancholy, and Ludger, as usual, just buried everything and carried on.

“Victor,” Jude prompted. “Victor, who did something terrible because he felt threatened. Victor, who _killed us_ for trying to take away a member of his family.”

“You don’t think Ludger would have…!” Rowen said, shocked.

Jude waved his hands helplessly. “Who knows? Was it really worth the possible consequences?” The guilt that had been gnawing at him had metamorphosed into anger, and horror at what he had almost been part of. “What were we doing? What were we thinking?”

Alvin, despite not being completely sure what they meant about Victor, let out a loud, frustrated sigh. “We were doing what we thought we had to, right? I mean, we need a bridge, but…”

“But we weren’t thinking about Ludger’s feelings at all,” Leia finished, and Elize nodded along in agreement. “We were too focused on the mission…”

Milla actually looked ashamed. “I thought I had gotten past behaving like that.”

Only Gaius and Muzet had been quiet, and the great spirit drifted around to look at the king. “You understand, don’t you?” she said. “You have a sister. If your sister wanted you to kill her, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t hesitate just a little. I know you’re not a rock.”

Gaius scowled, but he was spared from answering as the door opened and Ludger appeared. Everyone immediately fell silent, and the young man stepped into the room, his gaze flicking between them with varying degrees of hostility. Jude could guess what he was thinking; they had been heartless and they deserved whatever vitriol Ludger had to offer. But as Ludger’s eyes finally landed on him, his expression softened, and he came forward to offer Jude the gauntlets he had abandoned on the pavement outside.

Ludger’s cuffs were damp, and his eyes were slightly red, but Jude didn’t mention that, tucking the gauntlets away and watching him carefully. “Are...you all right?”

“...yes,” Ludger said very, very quietly. “Thank you, Jude.”

“What about Julius?” Gaius asked.

Ludger stared at him for a moment, then nodded to the window. When they looked, they could see the stream of light, arcing up and connecting the harbor to Canaan.

Jude bit his lip, hard, and said slowly, “Ludger… I’m so sorry. I didn’t want it to come to this.”

As if that apology had broken the floodgates, the others began to chime in. Leia and Elize were tearing up, apologizing for not listening. Alvin apologized for pushing too hard, and Milla came over to put a hand on Ludger’s shoulder along with her own apologetic words.

Ludger shut his eyes, just listening, and when they finally fell quiet, he said, slowly, as if thinking through each word carefully, “You can’t make decisions for me. I... feel like I haven’t had any control since I chose to leave for my first day of work, weeks and weeks ago. Even Julius shouldn’t have tried to work around me like that. I know he wanted…” his voice cracked, “...wanted to protect me, but… But I thought I could trust you, and you tried to leave me and shove me aside. You didn’t care how I felt.”

“Ludger…” Jude began, but his voice choked off as Ludger added one last thing.

“Now I know how Victor felt.”

An uneasy silence fell over the group after that. Ludger went quiet, his words seemingly exhausted, though he didn’t move from his place at Jude’s side. It was Jude who finally broke the silence, glancing at the sunset and asking, “Will the soul bridge hold up?”

Ludger nodded. Jude turned back to the rest of the group, suggesting, “Let’s stay here tonight, then, and figure out a plan. We won’t know what to expect up there, so we can stock up on supplies and make sure we’re at full strength. And then, we can go save Elle.”

No one objected. No one was willing to contradict Jude or Ludger any more today. They separated, Gaius and Alvin going to talk to the weapons merchants, Rowen and Elize going to stock up on gels and holy bottles, and the rest finishing small odd jobs for extra money, to make sure they had enough food, since they didn’t know how long it would take to get through Canaan. Jude stayed at the inn with Ludger, who was once again stress-cooking a pot of soup, presumably for when the others returned. Jude helped wordlessly, chopping things when Ludger pointed them out and fetching things from cabinets. When the soup was finally left to simmer, Ludger finally took a deep breath.

“You were the only one to listen to me. Thank you,” he said.

Jude shook his head. “We were wrong to try to do things without you. All you needed was time, and understanding, and we just ignored that to move on. I’m...ashamed of myself, for not saying something sooner.”

Ludger clasped his shoulder tightly. “You spoke up when it mattered,” he said, in that soft way of his, and Jude nodded, unable to meet his eyes.

Tomorrow they would go to Canaan, to save Elle and their world. Everything would be done, and they would finally be able to rest. And no one deserved that rest as much as Ludger.

Jude just hoped everything would turn out all right in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a drabble and it got away from me. X'D It didn't occur to me until after I finished this particular ending that it's basically the same situation as Victor's, just with a different person. And, since Victor is Ludger, Ludger snapping in the prime dimension actually makes a lot of sense. But yeah, realizing that the rest of Xillia's cast was honestly prepared to just traipse off and kill Julius without Ludger, I kind of wanted to write fic where they wake up and realize what the hell they were about to do.
> 
> I've never written for this fandom before and I'm a mess of feels, so any characterization flaws are the result of that. I do picture Ludger as a very quiet person, though, even after playing the game with the voice acting enabled. Or at the very least, he's very deliberate about what he chooses to say (even when it's something silly).


End file.
